Enter the Raccoon by Beatriz Hausner

Enter the Raccoon documents a love affair between a woman and a raccoon. They are a couple that loves without preconceptions, whose being together eschews all limits until their beliefs in the self are put to the test. Their story unfolds each time one surrenders to the other in a sometimes melancholic and cruel, other times joyful, even ecstatic embrace.

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Praise for Enter the Raccoon:

“Not since Marian Engel’s Bear has the thirst for CanLit bestiality been so righteously quenched. Enter The Raccoon brings the reader into a wild world of otherworldly love with arms—and mechanical paws—wide open.” — Chris Urquhart for This Magazine

“It is a human-sized raccoon that greets you as you plunge into the subconscious wiring of Beatriz Hausner, accessed through this prosthetic book machine, this ‘mechanical extremity’ that bids you to Enter the Raccoon. This is a book you will wish you could dream. Its cumulative prose lines extend through the essay, the anecdote, the fable, into the realm of fancy, fantasy, and fornicating (transpecies) wish fulfillment. It arrives at poetry and dives through that soft mirror to reveal the ancient machine working the illusion in the kingdom of happiness. This is the machine that knows you, and whispers things to you about your magic body that you can only imagine. It speaks of love as a thing made at the origin of language only to explode in radiant embrace.” — Gregory Betts

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Beatriz Hausner started writing about Raccoon long before it was established that Toronto was host to the largest population of raccoons in the world. Hausner has written about other creatures also, mostly in verse, which she has published as poetry collections and chapbooks. When not writing or translating surrealist literature, she edits journals, publishes books for others and works full-time as a public librarian in Toronto.